Quote by Anita Desai: “A mother's love is the purest form of violence.”

This is deliberately provocative: love, especially maternal love, can be controlling, consuming, and damaging even when it is entirely sincere. When someone loves you so completely that your individual self has no room to exist, that love — however real — causes a kind of damage. Purity of intention does not prevent harm.

Fasting, Feasting was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and explored the relationship between a consuming Indian mother and her children. Desai examined how family structures — particularly the role of mothers — both sustained and stifled individual identity in Indian middle-class households.

Indian novelist and short story writer, born in Mussoorie in 1937, and three-time Booker Prize shortlistee. Her novels — including Clear Light of Day, Baumgartner's Bombay, and In Custody — explore the inner lives of women and the textures of post-independence Indian society with psychological precision.